Hiding From Pigeon Shoot Is No Picnic

CARPENTER

September 04, 1991|by PAUL CARPENTER, The Morning Call

Labor Day was too nice a day to waste by watching hundreds of nincompoops heap abuse on each other. Besides, I had gone to every Hegins pigeon shoot for the last few years and decided it was unlikely I'd miss anything that wouldn't be covered in the newspaper.

Puttering around the house, compared to observing the shoot, was heavenly -- until the picnic began.

Hogar Crea is an organization of recovering drug addicts and they held their annual picnic at a nearby park. Not content to be merely noisy, they felt compelled to use big powerful amplifiers to share their fabulous noise with others far and wide.

Whitehall Township and Allentown residents were the chief beneficiaries, but I wouldn't be surprised if the amplifiers also reached parts of South Whitehall and Hanover. Gee, I wonder why all those narrow-minded people in Easton made a fuss about Hogar Crea's plan to put a rehabilitation center in a residential area.

Anyway, I put my puttering projects on hold, jumped on my bicycle and headed for the back roads of Berks County, where the major sources of noise were chirping birds and the wind rustling the leaves.

On my way back, however, I came upon a group of men in camouflage outfits holding shotguns. I stopped to ask why they weren't in Hegins with all the other shotgun people. "This is the first day of dove season," one of them said.

It's fate, I concluded. I can't escape the issues surrounding the pigeon shoot no matter what I do.

The dove hunters, even if you are horrified by hunting, represent a contrast. They are sportsmen.

Doves, I'm told, become wary of people once they leave the telephone wires in front of my house. Hunters must prowl through the boondocks and shoot the elusive prey without benefit of a jack-in-the-box rig to pop it up 34 feet away.

The Hegins shooters are not sportsmen. They blast away at sitting-duck targets after walking no more than a few strides from their beer bottles. They do not clean up their own mess, but leave the dirty work for obsequious young boys. The pigeon shoot has no appeal except for blood lust and it gives Schuylkill County a benighted hillbilly image.

You'd think this repulsive and archaic mess would go away on its own. As a matter of fact, a story in Sunday's paper quoted a shoot founder as saying the event was about to fold a few years ago when it was revived by the anti-shoot protests.

If you think that's just bluster, check yesterday's paper. Animal rights activists, rather than combat the shoot with thoughtful dialogue and meaningful lobbying efforts, resorted to asinine gestures.

They set up a triage center in a van, with syringes and bandages, and a maudlin New Jersey veterinarian. A pigeon MASH unit some distance away was staffed by a vet from Nevada. A picture showed a woman in a white smock with a red cross on her sleeve carrying a KO'd pigeon into one of the medical facilities. With all the suffering and needs of human beings in this world, such affectations seem tasteless.

Yesterday's paper also mentioned vitriol spewed by Greg Hindi of Kansas, and Monday's paper said his brother, Steve Hindi of Illinois, was going on trial today on charges stemming from last year's protest.

The brothers have emerged as protest leaders and that represents a bizarre paradox. Why do people who are purportly devoted to magnanimity allow themselves to be led by these two noodles?

You may recall, for example, that one of their past tactics was to challenge shoot organizers to fistfights, and Steve Hindi tried to bamboozle reporters with dubious video footage of last year's confrontations.

Just last week, he was still sending me letters telling me "I don't care if you believe it (the video fiasco) or not ... See you at the shoot."

No, he didn't see me there. The Hegins adversaries care more about not letting the other side win than they do about pigeons, one way or the other, and I'm tired of them. I'd rather listen to picnic noise.